Digital transformation using next generation on premises private cloud (dHCI) with a Hybrid Cloud strategy for Backup as a Service and DR as a Service (BaaS and DRaaS) no matter where the infrastructure resides.

Having been in the industry for over 85 years, William Davis Homes are award winning experts in building high quality, beautifully finished houses. They are one of the most respected housing developers in the Midlands. Everything they do ensures that each William Davis home offers comfort, craftsmanship and security.

William Davis first engaged with NG-IT whilst looking for an alternative back up and DR solution. They had been using an Asigra platform for many years which they felt was outdated and unable to keep up with the way things were moving within the organisation.

William Davis conducted a thorough review of the market and evaluated a number of suppliers before concluding that NG-IT’s Rubrik as a service was the best fit enterprise class product to provide the business with a clear understanding of service recovery time in the event of disruption (RPO’s and RTO’s) for BaaS and DRaaS.

The second phase of the digital transformation included a review of the private cloud platform. The legacy infrastructure was unable to provide the performance, flexibility and scalability that the growing business now demanded.

William Davis looked at several options before selecting an HPE Nimble dHCI solution to replace the legacy platform.

The BaaS and DRaaS solution provided the following benefits:

• Instant restore functionality Virtual Machlnes could be spun up on the platform instantaneously in the event of an emergency.
• Easy to use, deploy and set SLA’s
• Multiple restore options, whether that be in the cloud or drilling down into individual files, ultimately giving flexibility Ransomware remediation as a service.
• Flexible pay per consumption model.

The dHCI solution:

• Next Generation Private Cloud
• Integrated machine learning and AI across compute, networking and storage.
• Simplified management and administration across the whole stack.
• Significant performance increase for all business-critical services.

Rochdale Borough Council had a requirement for a rapid disaster recovery solution that would integrate natively with their existing primary solution and meet their RPO and RTO requirement. NG-IT procured, designed, deployed and tested the solution ensuring it satisfied this critical business need.

Rochdale Borough Council is the local authority of the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale in Greater Manchester, England. It is a Metropolitan District Council, one of ten in Greater Manchester and one of 36 in the metropolitan counties of England, and provides the majority of local government services in Rochdale.

The Council had previously procured a Primary Datacentre and Cloud based DR solution from another supplier. Despite the HPE Synergy and Nimble Primary Solution meeting all requirements, it quickly become apparent that the Cloud based DR solution was inadequate and not fit for purpose. The Council conducted soft market testing, consulted HPE for a potential solution that would replace the Cloud based design and went out to market with a tender that would meet its needs. NG-IT were not only successful in winning the bid but were also the only supplier to meet all technical and implementation requirements to provide a resolution.

The requirements were to ensure the DR solution would:

• Integrate natively with the Primary DC solution based on HPE technology, leveraging existing technology such as efficient Storage level replication.
• Ensure the solution met stringent RPO and RTO objectives with minimal data loss and recovery times in the event of a disaster.
• Enable rapid activation of DR to ensure services are up and running quickly. The activation method should be simple to allow anyone to perform given simple instruction. If possible, the entire failover and failback process should be fully automated.
• Allow regular non-disruptive testing to validate the solution works.

Following a competitive procurement process, Rochdale Borough Council selected NG-IT to provide a DR solution based on familiar HPE technology at a secondary datacentre. The technical team at NG-IT completed the following:

• Designed the new secondary datacentre Synergy and Nimble solution.
• Deployed and configured the solution.
• Integrated with the Primary datacentre.
• Fully automated disaster recovery.
• Tested with the Council to validate automated failover and failback works as designed.
• Knowledge transfer and handover to ensure the Council were confident managing this solution themselves after project completion.

“We developed a script to automate the DR failover and failback process, to allow the team to recover VMs in the event of a disaster by simply executing a single command. We used Powershell to develop this to minimise the complexity, to ensure that the Council are able to own and further develop this, themselves, without requiring additional consultancy in the future.” Amirul Islam, Technical Director at NG-IT.

South Tyneside Council has modernised and simplified their infrastructure by adopting a next generation private cloud solution provided by NG-IT.

South Tyneside Council is the local government authority for the metropolitan borough of South Tyneside, Tyne & Wear. The council’s main office is at South Shield’s Town Hall.

The council’s legacy infrastructure was nearing end of life and performance issues were increasing in frequency. Identifying and solving these issues was proving complicated and time consuming, therefore the council had a clear vision to find an improved server and storage solution, one that offers better performance, simpler support and easy to administer and manage.

Following a competitive procurement process, South Tyneside Council selected a HPE Nimble and Synergy next generation converged solution from NG-IT.

The Council wanted to be able to treat their servers and storage as one stack, therefore utilising one supplier, whilst provisioning sufficient performance and capacity for the next 5 years. The solution needed to take advantage of cloud based predictive data analytics for proactive support and holistic management of the entire stack. HPE’s InfoSight addressed this capability.

• Drastic improvement in performance; The council has seen around a 60% boost in the performance of the house keeping process for revenues and benefits .
• Improved visibility of configuration and performance metrics of Servers, Storage and VMs using OneView and Infosight.
• Reduction in physical datacentre equipment and fewer devices to monitor and manage.
• Cost reduction.

Watford Community Housing were looking to carry out a full infrastructure refresh focused on replacing a legacy solution in order to improve performance, end user experience and scale for future capacity requirements.

Watford Community Housing are a housing association with homes across South-West Hertfordshire who aim to make a real difference by delivering better homes and supporting their communities.

The newly established IT team at Watford Community Housing had inherited an ageing legacy compute, network & storage infrastructure from a Managed Service Provider which was causing issues with both lack of capacity and performance. They found that the systems were failing to deliver a number of business-critical features, making it difficult to proactively monitor the datacentre, causing unnecessary downtime.

Watford Community Housing went to tech industry market leaders to test and investigate both converged and hyper-converged solutions before deciding on SynergyStack. With no prior engagements, NG-IT worked with Watford Community Housing’s IT team to design & implement a solution to suit their specific needs with the HPE OneView and Infosight features being the deciding factors.

The solution provided the IT team with management analytics of compute and storage in a single pane of glass view. The new infrastructure enabled both ease of administration for the department, and the ability to delegate responsibilities within the team which improved efficiency.

Midlothian Council has taken a transformational step on its digital journey by adopting next generation private cloud platform provided by NG-IT.

Midlothian Council is one of the 32 local authorities of Scotland. Its administrative centre is based in Dalkeith and it covers an area from the south of Edinburgh to the Borders.

The council’s legacy infrastructure had grown organically and was no longer a suitable platform to deliver ever expanding business services. With the increasing demands of doing more with less, the council needs to provide improved services whilst also reducing costs.

After a detailed review of the market, Midlothian Council selected a Nutanix next generation hyperconverged private cloud solution from NG-IT.

Nutanix delivers the agility of the public cloud, but with the control and security of on-premises infrastructure. The new solution provides the performance, resilience and scalability to power all the councils workloads – virtualised, container-based and bare metal from a single platform, simplifying datacenter operations, improving service delivery, and reducing administration overhead.

• Simplified Management
• Cloud like agility with on premises security.
• Building blocks to a hybrid cloud strategy.
• Automated Application Management Deploy apps in minutes not hours or days.
• Single platform to manage multi cloud environments

A complete storage infrastructure replacement focused on cost reduction, minimising downtime and improving manageability.

The West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service is the county-wide, statutory emergency fire and rescue service for the metropolitan county of West Yorkshire, England. It is administered by the Fire and Rescue Authority, a group of 22 councillors who are appointed annually from the five metropolitan districts of West Yorkshire.

The service had ageing legacy storage infrastructure which was proving time consuming and difficult to manage including manually upgrading firmware for both shelves and disks. These updates needed scheduled downtime.

West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service went to market to test and investigate other technologies before deciding on Nimble Storage. Initially, there was no established relationship between NG-IT and the fire service, however we were able to utilise our level of expertise as the largest Nimble reseller in Europe.

The immediate benefit was the ease of transfer from their old storage to the new and complete data migration with zero downtime. The Nimble solution included iSCSI storage with built in replication and snapshotting which could be used as a means of back up and replication to a DR site. The ease of carrying out updates made management far less time consuming. The fire service no longer needed to rely upon a dedicated person to monitor storage thanks to the proactive monitoring capabilities (Infosight) from Nimble which represented another cost saving.

The benefits a SmartStack solution delivers, together with a transparent pricing structure, wins the day for the Useful Simple Trust.

The Useful Simple Trust is an employee benefit trust consisting of five innovative companies specialising in the field of sustainable design, engineering and educational services.

The Trust is associated with some of the world’s most iconic projects, from the London 2012 Velodrome to Las Arenas in Barcelona, valued between £30,000 and £500m.

The Useful Simple Trust was operating within an aging IT infrastructure which was insufficient to support the future growth strategy of the businesses within the group. A five year maintenance agreement with their Dell EqualLogic storage array was coming to an end, with no option to extend the agreement. The time was right to start looking for a new solution.

Also, following an in-depth evaluation (involving detailed calculations and cost comparisons) the Trust identified that the competitor solutions reviewed would use 2-3 times the power of the SmartStack solution. The SmartStack single shelf solution produces less heat due to its size so requires less cooling.

The Trust’s requirements were focused on:

• Longevity – the Trust didn’t want to be in the same situation in another five years so a long-term solution was a pre-requisite.
• Flexibility/Scaleability – the solution needed to be able to support the expansion and evolution of the companies in the group in terms of capacity and performance, within the same infrastructure and without the requirement for capital investment in the near future.
• Price – pricing should represent good value for money – the Trust needed to see what they were getting for their money with ‘no surprises’.
• Ease of operation – the solution needed to be intuitive in the early training phase and low maintenance in the long term.
• Security – data protection, backup and recovery should be seamless and require minimum intervention.
• Power Consumption – with the Trust’s own ethos of sustainability, the solution’s impact on the environment was a key consideration.

The Trust’s IT team initiated a thorough technical due diligence process, evaluating numerous converged and non-converged storage solutions in the marketplace including NetApp, Dell and EMC.

The converged SmartStack solution was selected as the primary IT infrastructure to support the data storage and protection needs for all five companies in the Trust, supplied and installed by NG-IT.

SmartStack combines best of breed server, networking and storage from Nimble Storage and Cisco with leading software vendors including VMware, Microsoft and Citrix to provide a complete private cloud infrastructure.

A key differentiator in the selection process was NG-IT’s clarity of proposition combined with the quality of the solution. The total transparency of the pricing presented enabled the decision makers within the team to see exactly what they were getting for the money.

Although still in its infancy, the Trust has already experiencing numerous benefits:

• Short Learning Curve – after just one day’s on-site training from NG-IT, the team was competent enough to administer the new solution.
• Ease of operation – Administration of the Trust’s previous server had been time-consuming and at times, problematic. SmartStack’s intuitive web Interface has been designed to ease administration and in the words of the client, eliminates all the complexities and ‘just works’. The previous solution (storage only) utilised 6U, whereas SmartStack now utilises 3U and the amount of cabling has been reduced from 48 cables to 16. A 10Gb Ethernet cable has been deployed to the distribution layer, as a more efficient alternative to the multiple 1Gb cables which would have been required for the competitor solutions reviewed.
• Latency reduced – Exchange server average latency has been reduced from 7msec to under 0.5msec.
• Visibility – Nimble Storage’s InfoSight analytics deliver total transparency by allowing the team to easily interrogate reports and check status at a glance, detecting any issues before they become problems.
• Improved Efficiency – one platform for storage and disaster recovery has improved efficiency and saved time. The ability to run Nimble replicas at night has reduced the workload on the Trust’s Veeam server by 30%, resulting in a reduction in checking time too.

NG-IT delivers a significant performance boost to address the growing demands of the council’s users.

Xentrall is a public sector partnership which was set up to deliver a range of back office services including ICT, design and print and transactional HR and finance to Stockton on Tees Borough Council and Darlington Borough Council.

The ICT division of Xentrall is responsible for the development and management of the technical infrastructure and operational ICT services for both councils including hardware, software, network installation, support and maintenance and provides a single point of contact for all ICT support and service requests.

Xentrall currently supports 5000 users on 500 virtual servers split across 2 data centres. The requirements of the Councils had changed significantly since 2010 when the existing HP3PAR platform was installed and it was no longer able to meet the growing demands of its users in terms of disk speed and server performance.

Administration was proving to be cumbersome and costly and the monitoring of performance was neither intuitive nor informative.

The ICT team at Xentrall was looking to achieve:

• a significant performance boost to address the growing demands of the council’s users long term security and flexibility by adopting the latest innovative technology
• ease of use – administration must be intuitive
• visibility – capacity and performance must be easy to monitor
• experience – success stories for installations at similar sized operations were a prerequisite in the decision-making process
• cost efficiency – Xentrall had a fixed budget in mind so cost and value for money were both high on the agenda.

The team at Xentrall conducted a stringent research process and identified a number of contenders including an updated version of the incumbent HP 3PAR solution as well as solutions from Dell, EMC, Nutanix, Pure and Tegile.

NG-IT presented a tier 1 converged solution consisting of SmartStack with Nimble storage and Cisco UCS servers. A Nexsan solution that gave long term retention and highly granular backups was also installed across the solution.

Nimble’s technology was an instant hit with the team, particularly its ease of management and transparency in terms of reporting on performance and capacity.

NG-IT was also able to demonstrate extensive knowledge and experience ofworking on enterprise scale solutions with organisations in various industry sectors, boosting the Xentrall team’s confidence in both the proposed solution and NG-IT’s ability to implement it.

• Performance – Almost immediately ICT staff observed a vast improvement in performance, including major increases in the speed of backup jobs (30% faster), batch processing and admin tasks such as ad hoc data moves and restores of files and servers from backups.
• Physical space – 3 racks of storage has been reduced to less than 3/4 rack.
• Cost savings – a 10kW reduction in power consumption has been achieved at each of the two datacentres (partly due to the fact that the new solution requires less air conditioning) equating to a 30% reduction in power consumption.
• Latency – a significant reduction has been achieved – an average of 20 milliseconds for the previous system has been reduced to 0.5 milliseconds (use graph supplied to illustrate this point). Adoption – the onsite training provided by NG-IT was sufficient to take the team to a level of competence sufficient for the day to day operation of the system, eliminating the requirement for additional training from Nimble Storage.

NG-IT eliminates performance issues, boosts capacity and increases productivity with Nimble Storage, for Killik & Co.

Founded in 1989 in a small chemist’s shop in Chelsea, Killik & Co started life as a stockbroking firm but now offers a wide range of financial services and advice. The company has a branch network of nine offices in the Greater London area with a regional office in Ipswich and an international office in Dubai.

Killik & Co manages savings for a vast range of clients and individuals and has a dedicated team of brokers who provide access to complicated financial markets and allow them to grow their savings and maximise their investment opportunities.

As a global investment company, a robust IT infrastructure is regarded as an essential component to Killik & Co’s success.

Killik & Co had a storage infrastructure which was not meeting the organisation’s growing demands. The company was continually encountering performance issues and disk space was becoming a major concern.

Killik & Co had a storage infrastructure which was not meeting the organisation’s growing demands. The company was continually encountering performance issues and disk space was becoming a major concern.

Killik & Co had a storage infrastructure which was not meeting the organisation’s growing demands. The company was continually encountering performance issues and disk space was becoming a major concern.

Following a 30 day proof of concept managed by the team at NG-IT, the Nimble Storage solution was selected. The solution is based on a Nimble CS260 in their primary data centre in London with all data being replicated to a second CS260 located in their Manchester datacentre. The Array is hosting a VMware ESXi cluster with virtual machines running common Microsoft Applications including Exchange and SQL Server.

Killik & Co has experienced multiple benefits following the installation of the Nimble Storage solution.

• Performance: Performance improvements were immediately evident. For example, Killik & Co processes a large volume of transactional data overnight which is then imported into a CRM system the following day. This process was regularly failing or taking a long time to complete. Since the installation of the Nimble Storage solution, the process runs without interruption to completion, three times quicker.
• Capacity: Killik & Co’s previous system did not have Thin Provisioning enabled. Since migrating to the Nimble Storage solution, space usage has been reduced from 14TB to 7TB through the use of thin provisioning, efficient disk utilization and real-time compression. This saving has given Killik & Co the flexibility to clone elements of their production environment for testing purposes.
• Visibility: Nimble’s InfoSight solution provides the ability for Killik & Co’s IT department to ensure that the infrastructure is running at peak health by providing access to performance statistics and detailed feedback on any problems with solutions, in real time. It also provides projected usage statistics allowing them to forecast and plan ahead.
• Cost: Killik & Co investigated the option of implementing a cloud-based solution, but soon found that this approach would have cost up to three times as much and reduced the level of flexibility that on-premise storage provides. Killik & Co has been able to reduce its dependency on a third-party backup solution since implementing the Nimble Storage solution, through the use of snapshot and replication technology. This has resulted in a significant cost reduction. Through the use of Nimble’s InfoSight and VMware vCenter plugin, storage management overhead has also been reduced, allowing Killik & Co’s IT Department to concentrate on other projects.
• Flexibility: Nimble Storage includes support for Hyper-V which is something Killik & Co are looking to migrate to in the coming months and was a key driver when choosing new storage.